Departmental News

Posted:  Mar 28, 2025 - 10:00am

Dr. Matthew Schmader, Adjunct Associate Professor in the UNM Department of Anthropology, has published a comprehensive monograph on his work in Uncovering America’s First War: Contact, Conflict, and Coronado’s Expedition to the Rio Grande, published by UNM Press.

Matthew F. Schmader’s groundbreaking book provides the first in-dept report on new, important archaeological evidence from conflict between the Puebloan people of the Middle Rio Grande Valley and the first Spanish-led incursion in the American Southwest during the early sixteenth century. Drawing directly from personally conducted archaeological research done over the past fifteen years, Schmader’s work uncovers Piedras Marcadas Pueblo, an immense village of more than one thousand mud-walled rooms situated in present-day Albuquerque, New Mexico. When increasing tensions between Coronado’s expedition and New Mexico’s native peoples spilled over into violence at the end of 1540, Piedras Marcadas was at the center of America’s earliest named sustained conflict: the Tiguex War. Today, hundreds of artifacts found at Piedras Marcadas reveal the colliding cultures who fought each other within those now-silent ancient walls and plazas that were once the focal point of a fierce life-and-death contest for survival.

Matthew F. Schmader has been conducting archaeological research in central New Mexico for more than forty years. He has conducted research on sites of every major cultural time period in New Mexico and served as the Albuquerque City Archaeologist for ten years. He is currently an adjunct associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico.